[Michael F]

Julie,

I take your point about the effervescence and zing of ‘first love’ or infatuation as compared to the (mellower? deeper? richer?) vintage of domesticity … and you are probably right that that is one reason why poets seem more often to write about the former than the latter. But I also remembered the writings of Kierkegaard, that poet among philosophers, specifically the letters of Judge William to the aesthete, the seducer. I opened up the book (Either/Or, volume II) to peruse it, and as luck would have it, my eyes alighted on this:

This much we have proved: that conjugal love … is not only quite as beautiful as first love but far more so, because it contains in its immediacy a unity of more opposites. It is, therefore, not true that marriage is a highly respectable estate but a tiresome one, while love is poetry. No, marriage is properly the poetical thing.

(I’ve written a few poems on the beauty of enduring love; I should write better ones.)

I have to post this poem by Yeats because it expresses, it seems to me, a love that goes beyond the sensual or ‘first love’ stage as well as the ache of frustration, so wondrously phrased:


When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

-- WB Yeats